With the increasing implementations of satellite and cable systems, more and more users are using digital video recording capabilities to record their favorite television shows and events. Many such recordings are of considerable length, and memory capacity for storing recorded events is limited. The number of events that may be saved is inversely proportional to the length of the events or programs that have been recorded. In many cases, when storage capacity has been used, new recordings cannot be made until recording space is freed-up from previously made recordings.
In current systems, each recorded program or event is kept as a single file. A user may begin to view a recorded program and then have to stop the viewing in order to tend to other matters. Such interruptions may occur quite frequently and over a period of days or even weeks. Thus, it may take a viewer several weeks to completely view an extended recording such as the final eight hours of a tennis tournament or the final day of a golf tournament. Since the entire recording is processed as a single file, the entire file is saved until the entire file has been viewed and erased. Until the recording being viewed has been completely viewed and erased, there may be no additional memory space available for recording new events or programs.
Similar shortcomings are also present in other recording systems, including but not limited to, digital audio recording systems where a limited amount of storage is available and recorded data files are maintained intact until the entire file is erased.
Thus, there is a need for an improved method and implementation for managing and processing recorded data files.